‘GENERIC’ VERSUS ‘MATURE’ MEASURES OF CHRISTIAN RELIGIOSITY
‘GENERIC’ VERSUS ‘MATURE’ MEASURES OF CHRISTIAN RELIGIOSITY

Comparing two quantitative measures of religiosity

Summary/Abstract: A wide range of survey-based tools has been developed to measure religiosity, although the mostcommonly applied approaches tend to focus on ‘generic’ interpretations of religiosity for practicaland generalising reasons. However, these generic approaches have not always been satisfactorydue to the lack of variation in responses and the potential for poor correlation between the genericreligiosity measure and the overall impact of faith in respondents’ lives, particularly in less secularcontexts. This led us to explore whether there is a difference between measuring religiosity usinga ‘generic’ versus a ‘mature’ approach using 227 Christian respondents on Bantayan Island, thePhilippines. The findings suggest that overall religiosity among our respondents was high for bothmeasures, that the measures are strongly correlated, and that there was no statistically significantdifference between the scores for each scale; however, there was evidence to suggest that the twoscales are examining different dimensions of religiosity. When correlating the two religiosityscores to other scales on our survey, there was no statistically significant difference among the correlationswhen using the mature or generic measure of religiosity. This has important implicationsfor mental health and care research methodologies, for which we highlight the importance of usingcontextually appropriate measures that incorporate various dimensions of religiosity.

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